When he gets back to the restaurant, a dozen or so people are there. They want to have dinner with him—they’re curious about the visitor. It’s not tourist season. Is he here for the hot springs, or the rambutans? What does he do? Oh, a university professor, visiting from London? “I knew you couldn’t be local,” says one of the women, “Your Mandarin is so terrible.”
He hasn’t ordered any food, but Gaolan says, “I made you something simple,” and brings out soup, rice, a few vegetable dishes sprinkled with meat. “We grow all our own vegetables,” she adds. “Taste how fresh that broccoli is. Do they have greens like that in London?”
They are silent for a while as they eat, then the questions start again. What is he here to find out, is he writing about this place for his university? Is he married, does he have children? They are all older than him, the young people having left for further studies, for the bigger towns. Happy to have someone to fuss over, they put food on his plate, ask for news of the outside world. They have TV and the Internet, of course, but it is hard to understand how the world is changing when so much has remained the same here.
He asks how they live, and they tell him about the land they were given, for planting rubber, fruit, vegetables, so much they have to hire local labour come harvest time to get everything in. There is a flower garden named after the Thai princess Chulabom, who visits at least once a year. They grow more than enough for themselves, and the surplus gets sold in the market at Betong. It’s a good, simple life, and the Thai government treats them with respect. “We didn’t surrender, after all,” they remind him. “We negotiated a peace.”
“We came out of the jungle in 1987,” says a tall man in glasses. “Two years sooner than the other lot. They spent more time haggling, so they got a better deal—we weren’t allowed to enter Malaysia until later, but they could go right away. Doesn’t matter. We just wanted to get out.”
The other lot, it turns out, is the Communist Party of Malaya, who now occupy the Peace Villages. The people around him are from the Communist Party of Malaysia, a splinter group, comprising the Revolutionary Faction and the Marxist-Leninist Faction. “Did you believe different things?” asks Henry, and they mutter about this or that article, before a woman sheepishly admits, “We followed different people.” Anyway it’s all fine now: the Peace Villagers and the Friendship Villagers are on good terms again, partly because they have united in hatred of Chin Peng, the former leader who spent many of the post-Emergency years in China. “He should have saved us,” snaps Gaolan, “but he didn’t care, in the end.”